


Verschränkung

by nerdyvixen



Category: The Black Tapes Podcast
Genre: Angst/Comfort, F/M, Unsoundiversary 2020, also ft. Ruby Carver absolutely not getting paid enough to deal with this, quantum physics are a perfectly valid metaphor for emotional issues, with a side of fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-23
Updated: 2020-08-04
Packaged: 2021-03-01 17:00:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23800468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nerdyvixen/pseuds/nerdyvixen
Summary: The thing with quantum entanglement is that two particles being so dependent on each other that they refuse definition without the other is dreadfully inconvenient.ORDr. Richard Strand handles life after the not-apocalypse not nearly as well as he expected.
Relationships: Alex Reagan/Richard Strand
Comments: 16
Kudos: 47





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fantasminity](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fantasminity/gifts).



> Happy Unsoundiversary, Fantasminity! I'm honored to be your Tall Paul buddy this year. You said you wanted Stragan angst/comfort or fluff, and, well...I hope this fits the bill for you!

“You know, I never expected us to get this far.”

He almost can’t hear her over the music and conversation going on around them, but then again, that had always been among the draws for this hotel bar—background noise, relative anonymity, proximity to her apartment, distance from the studio, and a truly excellent wine list. “What do you mean?” he asks.

She’s looking at him, and somehow it’s worse than if she weren’t. Ever since the very beginning, when he had first begun to suspect that Alex Reagan’s disarming smile was somehow less deadly than her kind, dark eyes, he’d tried to avoid her uncontrolled focus. Alex focusing meant Alex uncovering, meant Alex taking him apart, meant Alex placing him in the middle of some Ptolemaic model of a story and managing to rework the narrative cosmos to orbit him. Her focus is a deadly thing, and for all his fascination with ruin, he’d come to view shifting out of her attention as the best means of surviving it. But times changed. _He’d_ changed, really, and that was the most quasi-miraculous thing about all of this. He’d changed, and they’d fought through an apocalypse and come out the other side mostly intact, and he _wants_ her to look at him with all the focus he’d spent months avoiding. He can categorize her scrutiny now, the spectrum of it falling somewhere between _we’re professionals, Richard, and I need you to act like it_ and _sorry, I didn’t realize you were already awake; I was just making up constellations from all the marks you asked me to leave on you._ He lives for her observation anymore, Schrödinger's skeptic collapsing into believer under her gaze, and Alex denying him her focus feels, at times, like she denies him the most basic tenets of life: breath, water, food, shelter, her.

But now she’s looking, and even though he’s a man who has learned at least twenty-seven of her sighs and tells, he has no idea what this particular shade of almost-grief in her eyes actually is.

“I mean,” she says, not even pensively, just so matter-of-factly that he bristles, “that I didn’t think we’d actually…you know… _stop_ all this. Win, I guess.” The hand not wrapped around her glass of red presses briefly against her sternum, where he knows a galaxy-studded scar throbs. The scar down the left side of his ribs twinges in sympathy; victory is not without its price, and a goddess took her dues out of them both. “Whatever winning means for this.”

“The world still exists,” he points out. “I believe that counts.”

She shrugs. Her sweater slips down her shoulder; she tugs it up artlessly. She’s too thin—they both are, and he knows it, and she knows it, and they’d stopped complaining about how bony the other one was sometime between their third and fourth night in room 314. “It counts,” she allows, “but I didn’t think we’d be here to see it existing, you know?”

“You and Nicodemus share one atom of self-preservation instinct, so I understand why you would think that,” he says, and in spite of the strange, bright melancholy in her eyes, she pulls a face at him. “But you’re resilient. Stubborn. Annoyingly persistent.”

“Careful, Richard. Someone might think you actually like me.”

“Well, we can’t have _that_ ,” he mock-chides, and some small part of him realizes it’s instinctive now and therefore a marvel to reach over the little table for her hand. “But my point stands. You were always going to make it through, Alex. That was never in question.”

“Was it?” Her fingers slide through his; idly, he strokes circles against the back of her hand with his thumb. Still, her gaze doesn’t leave his face; still, he can’t decipher it. “I seem to remember it being pretty touch-and-go for awhile there, what with the whole…” She gestures with her wine glass, which serves to both encompass their anti-apocalypse endeavors and also completely fail to do so. “…you know. End-of-the-world thing.”

“Eloquent.”

“Richard.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say.”

There’s no malice in his tone, but she flinches anyway before she sighs the particular sigh that means she’s trying to recenter after he’s lashed out. “I don’t know what I want to say, either,” she says after a moment. “This is…an unprecedented time.”

“It is,” he agrees softly.

“And even if _you_ believed I’d make it this far, I definitely didn’t. I thought…” She shifts in her chair as a blonde woman edges carefully past her. Her knees knock against his as she does; she doesn’t shift back. She instead presses in closer, her knees slotting easily between his, and the casual intimacy of it is strange and familiar at once. “I thought what we’ve been doing was just what people do at the end of the world—what people do when they don’t have anything else to lose.”

He leans in closer to her. They’ve already had the better part of a bottle of red between them, and really, how many times has _that_ happened by now? The bottle she’d mentioned in their farcical “mid-season finale” or however the producers had branded it is practically an archetypal mainstay of their interactions; like Goldilocks and her purloined porridge, he doesn’t know how to tell anyone about them without including the red.

Not that he has anyone he can tell about them. Alex and secrets are best kept close. By now, he’s had practice with both.

But still, the red warms his vision, loosens his tongue a little, and as he leans in to her, he pushes on the boundaries they’d wordlessly established the first time they’d fucked in a hotel while on a research jaunt and presses his lips against hers in the barest suggestion of a kiss. “And what _have_ we been doing, Ms. Reagan?”

For a moment, she freezes. They don’t touch in public, not much, their stints in hotel rooms (and once, memorably, in her office) unspoken indulgences, but almost before he registers that she _had_ frozen, she melts, kissing him deeply, easily, her hand tightening on his as she drags his lower lip between her teeth. He exhales in a hiss more pleasured than pained, then sets his wine glass on the table so he can tug her just that little bit closer, just close enough so that he can tangle his now-free hand in her dark hair. She hums against him, kisses him more firmly, and in spite of having kissed her now more times than he can readily recall, he opens for her as desperately as he had the first time, his senses flooding in giddy disbelief with the taste and sound and feel of her.

“We’re not doing enough of this,” she says softly a minute later when she leans back.

“Definitely not enough,” he agrees breathlessly. His mouth thrums.

She stares at him for a moment with that same unreadable look, but parsing it becomes less important when she smiles, sun-bright and just as warm. “It’s probably not professional, but I think kissing you is my favorite way to get you to stop lecturing.”

“You like it when I lecture.”

She rolls her eyes, but she’s still amused and can’t hide it; he has the red to thank for her transparency. Well, the red, and all the stolen moments on nights like this, in this hotel and in others, when he has the luxury of being able to study an unguarded and affectionate Alex Reagan. “ _You_ like to lecture,” she sniffs, but she ruins the jibe with a grin. “ _I_ just humor you.”

He laughs in response, huffy and light, then kisses her again. “I think you just like having the excuse to kiss me in hotel bars,” he notes, but the mirth in her eyes falters. He frowns. “Alex?”

The melancholy in her eyes spreads, pressing down her shoulders and shrouding the warm affection that had wrapped around them both just a moment before. She’s silent for too long; her eyes scan his face like she’s trying to carve his features into memory, and when she speaks, her voice is ghost-thin. “Who gets you, Richard?”

He blinks. It doesn’t make anything any clearer. “What do you mean?”

Her grip on his hand tightens. “That’s—that’s _my_ laugh. I haven’t heard you laugh like that for anyone else. And now the world didn’t end, and just…” She goes silent. Around them, the music continues, something sultry and low; around them, the patrons gossip and flirt; around them, the world continues to have not ended while between them, the universe tilts until he’s no longer certain where he stands. “Who gets you, now that the apocalypse is done?”

“I don’t understand,” he says numbly.

The bar is dim— _atmospheric_ , she’d called it during their first rendezvous, right before she’d leaned up and kissed him that first time, her mouth on his a firebrand, an ocean—but her eyes are bright and wide, too much of either to be normal. “We’ve always been on borrowed time. I mean, I…” She doesn’t look away, but her hand shakes. “I always thought I’ve been borrowing you. And someone else would want you back.” _I thought you’d go back to Coralee_ goes unsaid but not unheard. “Or you’d want to go back. Or just leave. You’re really good at leaving.”

He can’t argue.

“You’re good at leaving,” she carries on rapidly, “and you’re terrible at goodbyes, and I thought that this—all this hiding and sneaking and hooking up in hotel rooms and hoping no one finds out—I thought it was just what we do at the end of the world. When it didn’t matter what we did because there wouldn’t be any consequences that would stick.”

The feeling of being off-course strengthens. “Did you…are you saying you slept with me because there weren’t going to be any consequences?”

“No. Yes. I don’t know.” She presses the heel of her hand into her eyes. “None of this is normal, Richard. This isn’t how normal people meet. This isn’t how people usually hook up, even if they’re colleagues. _Especially_ if they’re colleagues.”

“You’ve hooked up with colleagues before,” he points out, distant.

Alex groans. “I already told you I had. It’s not like I keep Amalia a secret.”

“Was I just going to be another notch on your bedpost, then?”

She stares at him. “Are you seriously trying to shame me in the same hotel we routinely meet up in for off-the-record sex?”

“That’s ridiculous.” He can feel the tension building—not the kind of tension they wanted building right now, frankly, but it has a certain inevitability to it, a sense of normalcy even though he doesn’t want the normal that they’d been used to, where they fight and squabble and tear into each other. He wants the normal they came here for, wrapped up in the fragile intimacy that anonymity and a crowded bar bring. It’s the kind that tips towards sex that somehow starts when both of them are still fully clothed and three feet apart, the kind that feels as much like love as he’ll selfishly allow himself. He knows she doesn’t love him. She _can’t_ , not after all this. Not after a goddess almost ripped their world apart, not after he’d lied to her for so long, not after he’d let her bleed for him, not after—

She sighs, and he knows this one, too: she’s giving up this particular argument, at least for now. “I don’t want to fight,” she says softly.

“What _do_ you want, then?”

In spite of everything, his voice comes out nearly gentle, and Alex squeezes his hand—a peace offering, both her touch and his voice, though describing anything of his as ‘gentle’ is still unsettling. “What time is your flight out tomorrow?” she asks.

They both know. “I need to be at the airport by eleven,” he answers anyway. “My flight leaves at one.”

“One.” There are other words on her tongue, but she doesn’t say them; he knows that look on her face, knows the way she squares up her shoulders, knows the sudden tension that flares up her spine and then dissipates. Words on her tongue, a fight somewhere in her throat, some different kind of war climbing up the slats of her ribs: all of them die before they catch air, and she smiles, mostly. “Right. So you’ll need to be up by nine, otherwise you’re going to be a menace—”

“—I’m never a _menace_ —”

“—which means you’ll need to be at least _aiming_ for sleep by twelve-thirty—”

“—really, you act like I’ve never gotten myself on a plane before, Alex, and I’m a grown man—”

“—which _means_ ,” she carries on, ignoring his protests and fixing him into stillness with her dark eyes, “that what I _really_ want, Richard, is to borrow you for the next five hours.”

“To borrow me?” he repeats, every nerve suddenly trembling with the weight of what that means—what that _could_ mean, if he were the type of man to let himself believe in anything, but he can’t look at it too closely, not if it means it could collapse under him—

“Yes,” she says as she slides off her chair to stand between his knees. She drops his hand and loops her arms around his neck, and automatically he bends to meet her for a kiss. She’s soft, pliant, warm around him, so achingly _herself_ that for a moment, he can hardly breathe. “I want to borrow you,” she murmurs into him. “Please. Just for one more night.”

He’s not sure what to say; for people so devoted to storytelling, words feel superfluous for them right now. But she’s here against him, familiar and dangerous and luminous, and she kisses him like she’s been doing it for decades, and he kisses her like he’s spent decades wanting to. “Come to bed, Alex,” he manages finally, each syllable a spell, a mantra, a fierce prayer into the dark, and she answers back with an exhalation of his name so desperate it can only be holy.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's really anyone's guess as to whether or not the actual end of the world or Ruby Carver on a mission is scarier.

Dr. Richard Strand is remarkably well-versed in myths, legends, folklore, fairy tales, religions, and ghost stories, and so it should not surprise him that his resolve lasts for only three days after returning to Chicago. It should _not_ , but it does, and his charming assistant is not going to let him hear the end of it.

“Okay, so real talk, here, boss, but you’ve been _unbearable_ ,” Ruby tells him unceremoniously. She flops down in the chair in his office that he resolutely has to remind himself _isn’t_ Alex’s and props her feet on his desk. “I know some of it’s jet lag, and I know some of it is just your sparkling personality, but you’re sitting around like someone kicked your dog.”

“I don’t have a dog,” he mutters, glaring at her shoes. At least his time away from the Institute had been good for _something_ —instead of her normal Vans, she’s wearing more vaguely work-appropriate heels along with smart trousers and a sleek blouse, and if the lines of her clothes are a little too sharp, if her neckline is just a little too deep, if her heels are just a little too _my work clothes double as fetish gear_ , he’s still going to be grateful that there’s _some_ semblance of professionalism about Ruby Carver nowadays.

She rolls her eyes. “Fine. Like someone kicked your thesis, then.”

Or not much of a semblance of professionalism. “That’s not—you can’t kick a thesis—”

“Not the point.” From somewhere in her decolletage, she fishes out her phone, unlocks it, and starts scrolling through it. “So you’ve been back in town for three days. Your plane landed, you got back to your apartment—and you’re welcome for keeping up with the rent and upkeep on that, by the way—and then I’m pretty sure you either did meth or pulled a move you learned from your intrepid journalist and stayed awake out of spite for the next fifteen hours. The only reason _you_ still have a job right now is because your name is on the building.”

“What are you _talking_ about?”

“So I got you in here while avoiding the press, because I’m damn good at my job,” she continues, not looking up from her phone, “but you’ve been an absolute pain in the ass for literally everyone to deal with since you got back. We can deal with you being all bitey and mean, you know, but none of us get paid enough to deal with you _moping._ ”

“I’m not _moping_ —”

She ignores his protests. “Do you know what I don’t have anymore, boss?”

“I’m sure you’re going to tell me,” he mutters, sinking back into his chair and staring fixedly at his computer screen instead of at the razor-edged woman across from him. “I’m beginning to suspect I don’t have much of a choice in that matter.”

“You don’t,” she agrees blandly. “But what I don’t have anymore is a laundry list of your dick moves in my inbox courtesy of Nic. We had a _schedule_ , Dr. Strand. Tuesdays and Thursdays, he’d email me, so I could run interference on the weekends if I had to. And you know what? I looked _forward_ to those emails. I looked forward to every single pissed-off text I got, every midnight rant, every Skype call, and do you know why?”

“An unfortunate fondness for a Canadian doormat with a taste for conspiracy theories and showing his belly to anything with a pulse?” he suggests.

She arches a brow at him. “When did you start thinking you were cute? Was it before or after you started sleeping with Alex?”

His cheeks burn. “This is _completely_ unprofessional,” he snaps.

“No, completely unprofessional is you and Alex sleeping together.” She takes her feet off his desk, puts her phone down face-up, and slides it towards him with one finger; it’s a pleasant surprise it’s not the middle one. “But I’ve got a weak spot for some good workplace drama, so that’s not what I’m talking about. I looked forward to every single time Nic got in touch with me about you because it meant you were still _you_. You were still the person I started working for. You were still Dr. Strand, Alpha Skeptic, even when Alex got in too close.”

She exhales, leans back in her chair, and steadies herself. “When you came back—when she found evidence that your wife was still alive—listen, I don’t scare easy, but you…you _scared_ me, then, all right? I hadn’t ever seen you like that. You want to talk unprofessional? Unprofessional is holing up in your office and refusing to shower for days on end because you don’t want to leave your conspiracy wall. And when Alex came—I didn’t want to let her in. You’d told me not to let anyone in, and honestly, I was more worried for her than for you. You were like a fox in a trap, boss, and I didn’t…you could have gone for her throat, and it would have been on me.”

“How would it have been on you?”

“Because _I_ let her in.”

“You and I both know Alex,” he points out. “If she wanted in, she was getting in. She’s unstoppable.”

“She is,” Ruby agrees, “and I counted on that a little, you know? Because I know you, and I know you need something to challenge you or you’re just insufferable. You could stand your ground till the end of time, you know? But only if you have something to stand up against. And I thought that maybe this would give you something to do, something to challenge yourself, but all of this—it turned you into someone I didn’t know anymore. I thought you coming back here after everything meant you were back to your old self.” She pauses. “By the way, a phone call or a text would have been nice--even just a ‘hey, sorry I’m late, just averting the apocalypse, we still have a conference call on Tuesday.’ Something. _Anything._ ”

“I was busy,” he says stiffly, and memory surfaces against his consciousness in great swaths: blood and seawater, both tasting the same on his tongue; screaming, his and hers and theirs; the star-studded eyes of something so great and terrible he can only wrap the word _goddess_ around it; claws against his ribs, leaving streaks of galaxies behind them; unearthly, unholy music; teeth driving into her sternum and stars spilling out around them; and power ripping through him, electric, while the universe sang in his ears—

His assistant soften a little. “I know,” she says, and he takes a deep breath and sinks back into himself, into his office, into this moment, getting scolded by Ruby Carver. “You’ve been busy for a long time. But you haven’t been yourself since you came back.” She pushes her phone towards him more, and automatically, he slides it closer and starts to scroll through her screen.

He’s not surprised that it’s a text message thread between her and Nic. The first one he sees is from almost four months prior: _You know, Rubes, I’m almost glad to have Strand back. He’s not my favorite person, but Alex looks more like herself again._

“Rubes?” he questions.

She rolls her eyes. “Keep going.”

Obligingly, he scrolls down further. _Is it out of bounds to have a standing dinner order sent over to Howard’s house? They’ve been holed up there for three days, and I know Alex doesn’t eat when she’s neck-deep in demons. Which is not a text I thought I’d ever send, but strange times._ He scrolls again. _I did the final edit on the latest episode today. I don’t want to blame daddy issues for too much of anything, but…I mean, did you know about Strand’s father?_

“Ruby,” he asks, “exactly what do you and Nicodemus talk about?”

“Not the point,” she tells him. “Go on.”

_Strand seems different lately. Kind of soft. I think he and Alex are sleeping together again, but she’ll murder me if I ask her._

_I miss the way this was in the beginning. Like Scooby-Doo if del Toro got to do it._

_Alex keeps talking about Geneva. Call me._

_I’m worried about Strand._

_Yes, I meant that. He looks like he’s going to fall apart. Alex is the only person who can pull him together. Professionally, that’s a problem. We have enough trouble keeping her name clean right now. I don’t know if he’s thought about that. She’s putting a lot on the line for him. Sure, she says it’s for a story, but it’s not. It’s for Strand, and I’m worried that he’s going to take her down with him._

_This would be easier if they were just hooking up._

“When did he find out?” he asks quietly.

“I think he knew after the first time,” Ruby answers, just as quietly. “I know you don’t have a lot of patience for his conspiracies, but he’s not a complete idiot, and he loves Alex, too, in his own way. He’s known her for years, and neither of you are subtle. I figured it out the same day, honestly.”

“How?”

A thin smile tugs at her mouth. “You only sign off your emails with ‘Kind Regards’ when something good happens. I’m not an idiot, either.”

He allows it and keeps scrolling. _They’re gone. I dropped them off. I don’t know where they’re going. I’m afraid._

_Have you heard from either of them? It’s been two weeks._

_I saw the news. Warren’s dead. Call me._

_Alex called. They’re alive._

_Did he seriously leave? Ruby. Call me back. Please._

_He left. Again._

_Yes, I expected better._

_We’re done. If you’re going to defend him, we’re done._

_I really hope he’s happy because Alex isn’t._

For a long time, he stares at the last message, sent just a few hours prior. Something unpleasant coils in his stomach: maybe the memory of how her eyes looked at the airport when she dropped him off, all dark and deep and drowning; maybe the cold certainty that whatever intimacy they had shared, whatever trust they’d had, had vanished when there wasn’t an apocalypse weighing on them. In the end, he’d felt almost like a stranger trying to leave the bed of his one-night-stand before she woke up and informed him exactly how much he hadn’t earned her openness and care. “I’m sure it’s just the end of the world talking,” he says finally, numbly. “She’ll learn to be happy again.”

“Learn to be happy again,” Ruby repeats. “And how well did that work for you after Coralee disappeared?”

“Don’t,” he warns.

“We’re not going to ignore this again,” she says, her voice as sharp as her heels and the line of her blouse. “I don’t get paid enough to do emotional excavation every time you get in your feelings about whether or not you deserve to be loved or whatever bullshit you tell yourself.”

“It’s not—” He stops, sighs, and presses his hand against his temples. _Call me when you get back to Chicago,_ she’d said, but the words sounded rote, and her fingers had twitched in the way he’d come to know was the anxious desire to flee. He hadn’t called. She hadn’t, either. Not that he’d been waiting. Not that he’d been disappointed. “She doesn’t love me. It’s selfish to pretend otherwise.”

“How do you have _two degrees_ and this much willful ignorance?” Ruby’s knuckles are white on her knees, a tic starting in her jaw. “Look, you should have figured out how to be a real boy a long time ago, and I get you’ve been someone else’s emotional punching bag for most of your damn life, but seriously, how the _hell_ are you still denying this? Alex Reagan is in love with you.”

He stares, uncomprehending.

“She’s in love with you,” Ruby carries on, her voice brittle and bright, “and it’s not your responsibility to love her back if you don’t feel that way, but you have to acknowledge that. That’s the _right_ thing to do. You can’t separate her from that, and you can’t separate yourself from that fact, either. You both have been tangled up in this whole thing since she walked into this office three years ago, and I’d really like to hear your argument for how you expected to be able to drop everything and pull away when you were done.”

“I had to,” he says, and his voice sounds as distant as the sea. _Alex Reagan is in love with you._ The room swims. “The press—”

“—is hounding you just as much as they hound her, if not more so. Besides, I don’t think she’d appreciate you patronizing her like that. She’s a grown-ass woman with what was, until about a year ago, a truly impressive resume and significant professional chops. She’s dealt with the press before. I made her dossier for you, boss. I know what she’s been through. Or did you forget the death threats, too?”

He hadn’t, not really, but he had forced them to the corner of his mind so he wouldn’t have to confront the reality that someone—multiple someones—had wanted and may still want her dead simply because of who she is. “I’ve ruined her career,” he persists.

“Yeah, you kind of did,” his assistant agrees plainly, “but, in your defense, she definitely helped. We both know her. This whole mess was a tango towards destruction, not a head-first dive.”

He barrels on; if he stops, if he dares to let himself think for a second— “I shouldn’t have indulged my…my _attraction_ in the first place. She’s young enough to be my daughter.”

Ruby rolls her eyes. “See also: every relationship in the Hollywood tabloids featuring whatever silver fox star-of-the-week the internet is drooling over and his too-young arm candy. Next.”

Her words burn in his throat. “She’s not _arm candy_ , Ruby.”

“Then what is she, boss?”

“She—” He swallows. “This isn’t something we should be discussing.”

“It shouldn’t be up for discussion at all. In a perfect world, you wouldn’t have been handed the shitshow of an upbringing you had to grit your teeth through.” Ruby is all edges, anger in a coil growing tenser and tenser, though even he can see that her anger, for once, isn’t directed solely at him. “You wouldn’t have had to raise Charlie on your own, Coralee wouldn’t have come in with every single designer lie and cult connection, you wouldn’t have had to deal with _any_ of that fallout because you would have just been the weird academic with a sweet little family and a small and happy life. But that’s not what happened. And whether you like it or not, you have this really _great_ habit of dragging everyone around you into your distinctly unprofessional bullshit, so there are going to be consequences.”

“Alex isn’t a consequence.”

“She isn’t?” Ruby picks up her phone, unlocks it, and scrolls through it a moment before handing it back to him. “Try this one.”

Again, it’s from Nic, though this one is from almost thirteen months prior. _Do you think you could tell Strand to tone down his whole tragic backstory bit? I swear, it’s like catnip for Alex. She’ll go after anything with a good story and a lot of heartache. I don’t buy his, for the most part, but she does._

“He thought you were making it all up,” Ruby tells him. “In spite of everything. I don’t think he believed any of it until—”

“—until Coralee came back.” He sighs, dragging a hand through his hair. Averting the end of the world had been strangely easier than confronting the way his own world had ended the day his wife had vanished, the way it ended again when she returned. He’d lost himself after Alex had uncovered Coralee’s lies, gathered himself back up into madness sharp-edged with anger and fear, lost himself once more after Coralee left the room in the rented house with every happy memory they’d ever built together in her hands. It had been the first night Alex had refused to kiss him, as though his tragedies were contagious, but now, separated from her and Coralee and the past and the nebulous future, he doesn’t blame her.

“Dr. Strand?”

“I’m sorry,” he says softly. “I haven’t been my best lately.”

“That’s an understatement,” Ruby agrees, not unkindly. “You haven’t been your best for a long time.”

“Yes, well, undoing generations of work courtesy of a cult turned corporate powerhouse as well as confronting a fair amount of childhood trauma and the reappearance of the wife I thought had been buried did take its toll,” he says dryly. “Forgive me for for not operating at full capacity.”

His assistant settles back in her chair, her eyes suddenly impossible to read. She’s quiet for several breaths, then she sighs, squares her shoulders, and asks, “When did you and Alex start sleeping together?”

“That’s not—”

She holds up her hand to stop him. “I’m not asking so I can dock you for inappropriate workplace behavior. Humor me. When did you two start hooking up?”

Around him, the office lights are bright and warm. The walls are soft gray, the carpet deep blue. The furniture is sleek and modern in stark contrast to the piles of books and the shelves of white tapes that started this all, and what had once been his fortress and armor in one is suddenly, completely strange. _This isn’t who I am anymore, is it?_ “Once in Los Gatos,” he confesses. “After Sebastian Torres had been kidnapped. There was—we’d had a lot of wine. It was a hot night, and we hadn’t planned on it at all, but we did. On the way back, she told me that she was so sorry to have pushed on our professional boundaries and that…that if I didn’t want to continue to work with her, she’d understand.”

“But you did,” Ruby supplies, “so you kept at it. Well, you two getting your freak on explains that whole thing with the cabin symbols, at least.”

“What thing?”

She snorts. “Please, like you weren’t doing the academic version of standing over her to correct a golf swing. Carry on.”

“There’s not much to carry on with,” he says, valiantly ignoring that particular comment. “Things unfolded. Percival Black. The demon board. Coralee.” He swallows back a heavy lump in his throat. “When she came here—when you tried to stop her—we…”

“Had sex in the office while I was at the front desk?” Ruby stares at him until he flushes. “Yeah, I know. You aren’t quiet, boss.”

“We didn’t sleep together again until she got back from Turkey,” he carries on hurriedly, clearing his throat, “and by then, everything felt temporary enough that professional boundaries seemed less important. She spent most of her nights with me. She told me she thought that was just what people did at the end of the world.”

Ruby blinks. “Okay, so we’re putting a pin in that, but we need to go back to something else here.” She drums her fingers on the edge of the table. “You guys were hooking up after you found out about Coralee. After everything you said about loving your wife. After you _insisted_ you loved her. So why does Coralee matter now?”

“Are you asking me why my _wife_ matters?”

“Yes, I am.” His assistant leans forward, her pale gaze piercing, discerning. “Because you only ever talk about her as your wife anymore when you’ve got some sort of open wound that you think grief is going to bandage. Coralee being gone didn’t matter in Los Gatos. Didn’t matter here. Didn’t matter after Turkey and every single time you fucked the journalist pulling your life story apart. Certainly didn’t matter when the world was ending. So why now?”

“I…”

He wants to have an answer to it. An answer, or something easy to say, something that would pull Ruby off of this conversation and send her back to work so he can stare at the wall until it’s time for him to go home to stare at the shadows there. He wants to be able to lie like he used to, quick and simple as breathing, but he’s just so _tired_ anymore. He’s tired to his core, and weary, and _lonely_ in a way he suspects is his due, and he sighs heavily and studies his fingers as they trace patterns against the woodgrain of his desk before he manages to speak.

“I saved the world,” he says finally. “As much as I could have, at least. With whatever _gift_ I have, I stopped what I can only call a primordial goddess from ripping our understanding of existence completely apart, and I know how these stories are supposed to go: either I was slated to die tragically in some attempt at heroism, or I was supposed to get a happy ending. Ride off into the sunset or whatever particular drivel goes along with a story like this one. At the end of things, I…”

He stops, words crowding his throat. He hasn’t spoken of that day to anyone since he and Alex had returned to the States, and he’s not sure he knows how to. There’s so much he can’t remember, so much that exists only as sensation and memory in the bone; there are stories carved into him now into the form of starry scars across his ribs from the claws of the goddess, a tale driven now into Alex’s heart from her teeth. Feeling rather than hearing the screams of the demons and the shadows, rage streaking across his vision, Warren twisting into something utterly inhuman as he goaded the goddess into fury—he can’t remember the words. He’s not sure he was even _himself_ at that point. He had been floating, drifting, remembering how much of his body was water and therefore primordial, until Tiamat had coalesced enough to—

“Dr. Strand?” Ruby sounds far away. The ocean roars in his ears.

—she’d gone for Alex. She’d gone for Alex, tooth and claw, and he’d—

“ _Dr. Strand._ ”

—he’d ripped the stars from Tiamat, torn the universe apart and woven Alex back together because he couldn’t imagine what a world worth saving looked like without her still in it—

“ _Richard!_ ”

“I didn’t save the world because it was the right thing to do,” he says numbly. “I saved it because of her. Because of Alex.”

Ruby is silent, her eyes wide.

“Because I—because I am a _selfish_ man.” The numbness turns sharp. “Because I am so selfish that I didn’t consider my daughter or Coralee or even you. Because I saw her—”

—saw her broken, saw her torn, her dark eyes wide and unseeing, her voice silenced—

“—and I couldn’t let them take her. And Alex…she loves this world too much to let it end. So I saved it. I saved it for her. And I’m selfish enough that I saved myself for her, too.”

“You expected to die.” It’s not a question. Ruby has worked with him for too long, seen too many spirals and dark moods to question this. Instead, she says it as a gentle fact, and it is the greatest kindness he knows that she does not reach out for his hand.

“I did,” he confirms. “I was supposed to fulfill a purpose, wasn’t I? A single-use key, to be discarded when the door was open and the end had come through.”

“But you didn’t.” Ruby tilts her head, looking for all the world the way she does every time he complains about the lack of proper skepticism in the world, and part of him latches onto it to bring him back to the safer shores of normalcy. “You’re still here. You saved the world. You were in Geneva for three weeks—for recovery, yeah? And then back to Seattle for two weeks, and then…here. Alone.”

“Alone,” he echoes, and for a long moment, silence stretches between them until Ruby breaks it once more.

“You’re a goddamn idiot, Richard Strand.”

In spite of everything, or maybe because of it, he laughs, small and almost unheard. “Yes, that’s the appropriate response to this—”

“Sarcasm isn’t going to save you this time, boss.” She doesn’t smile. “I’m so fucking tired of you martyring yourself over something that never even asked for a sacrifice. You bury yourself in the sins of your father and act like that’s the only thing you’ll ever carry. Every time someone gets close to you now, you tell yourself that you’re going to be abandoned and alone, so why bother investing? And now you’ve convinced yourself that Alex Reagan, who loves as easily as she breathes, couldn’t possibly love you.” She shakes her head. “You’ve spent your entire career debunking ghosts, but you’re clinging to the ghost of the man you told yourself you had to be.”

He stiffens. “That’s too far, Ruby.”

“Is it?” Her hands shake. “I don’t think it was far enough. I know you, Richard Strand. Professionally, I mean, and I’ve seen enough of you now to think that I’ve got a pretty good bead on you personally, too. You claim to be dedicated to the truth but really, you just want to control the narrative. You curate everyone’s experience with you—and don’t you _dare_ give me that look. I know what you did with the tapes. With Alex. You pushed her to see what she’d be willing to do for you, how useful she’d be, and then you got blindsided by her. She’s _good_ , Dr. Strand. She’s a good person, and she wears her heart on her sleeve, and she’s been wearing it for you for a long damn time—even when Coralee came back in.

“I can’t pretend to know what that felt like.” The tic starts again in her jaw, and she talks faster. “I don’t know what it’s like to love someone and then have them turn out to be a lie. And maybe you knew for way longer than you let on that Coralee was up to something, but I don’t think that’s the point. I think the point is that when you fell in love with Alex, you couldn’t control the narrative anymore. She could control you without even doing anything other than smile at you, and you ran scared every fucking time. You ran, because you think love makes you a liar, and it doesn’t. Love makes you a fool, but it doesn’t make you a liar. You did that to yourself.”

“Ruby—”

She shakes her head. “I’ve been covering for you since I started working for you. Every single irate phone call, every single time Emily DuMont sent a firmly worded email, every time you ended up making the circuit again because the control _you_ wanted was challenged by the way things actually are. So here’s the truth as I can see it, boss.” She takes a deep breath, then plows forward. “You _can’t_ control Alex Reagan anymore. There aren’t black tapes to entice her with whenever you feel like you’re not enough. There aren’t professional boundaries you can push her into when she gets too close to your soft spots because you chucked them out the window when you two started sleeping together. There isn’t a script. You don’t get to playact at being the reason for someone’s professor kink anymore because you went and were foolish and so predictable. You fell in love with her, and the biggest miracle I know isn’t that you saved the world but that she fell in love with you, too.”

The brightness in her eyes spills over; Ruby is an angry crier, and he knows it, but for a moment, charting the paths the tears make down her pale cheeks, all he can smell and taste is saltwater. _We are all made of the sea,_ comes the memory of a goddess’s voice in his head, her last words to him clear even as she dissolved into nothingness. _It is why you weep._ He watches his assistant scowl at him and her own tears in equal measure, watches her angrily shove the sleeves of her crisp blouse up past her elbows, and suddenly realizes that this is Ruby Carver making her heartbreak everyone else’s problem, turning all her hurt into edges so sharp she can’t be touched.

_I know the feeling._

“Just because you love Alex, doesn’t mean you loved Coralee any less,” Ruby says finally, with such strength in her voice that he almost misses the way her mouth trembles. “Just because you thought about Alex when the world was ending, doesn’t mean you love Charlie any less. You can love people in different ways. You can love more than one person at once. A lot of things can be true at once. I can be glad you’re alive and here and also want to hit you in the face with a stapler for being an idiot. Neither negates the other.”

“I’m glad that one of your core truths is violence,” he says. _I’m sorry that I didn’t realize the end of the world meant something to you, too,_ he doesn’t say, but he thinks she hears it.

“Shove it,” she shoots back, some of her anger fading. “Boss, look, I know it’s not my place—”

He raises an eyebrow at her. “And how has that stopped you from turning this into ‘Oh, I’m Having Unfortunate Feelings For Canadians’ Hour?”

She pulls a face and carries on. “—but sometimes? You’ve got to take a fucking _chance_ on something. Even if it hurts. Even if it doesn’t work out. Even if the ways you care about people and the truths you carry don’t come across right, you have to take a chance.”

_You know, Rubes, I’m almost glad to have Strand back._

He takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly, and part of him is still faintly surprised that the world has kept turning in the interim. The scars on his ribs throb. “What if Coralee comes back again?” he asks finally.

“She probably won’t,” Ruby answers, the acid and ire gone. “I don’t know all of what she did, but I know a cover-up when I see one. All the news outlets talked about was Thomas Warren being outed as a cult leader with ties to an eco-terrorist group. You’re getting press coverage because of the podcast, but that’s about it. Someone did a really thorough job of keeping the worst of it from the media and the government, and that has Coralee’s prints all over it.” She pauses. “Metaphorically speaking, of course.”

He cracks a wry smile. “Of course.”

“I think she’s probably gone for good, boss. I can get in touch with some lawyers. Her parents. Not right now, of course, but I think she could be declared legally dead in a few years.” She shrugs. “And if she does show back up? I don’t think she’d be able to argue against divorce. Not after everything. Marriages dissolve over things much smaller than the literal apocalypse.”

It shouldn’t feel this easy, to problem solve the burden of post-apocalyptic living the same way they’d prepare for press conference or particularly enthusiastic ghost hunters, but it’s comfortable, an oddly pleasant reminder that the world had been worth saving for more than just the dark eyes he still dreams about every night. “I should take the rest of the day,” he says abruptly. “Get some rest. Get some things in order.”

“You _have_ been insufferable,” Ruby agrees, rising to her feet with a grimace as her back pops. “About as insufferable as this fucking chair, I think.” She stretches, rolls her head on her neck, then shakes out her shoulders and heads to his office door. “So yeah, go home. Get your shit together. I’ve got things here. I held down the fort for two years. You don’t have to worry about it.”

“You know you’re not the fool, yes?”

She stops in the doorway but does not turn to look at him.

“If he can’t see that you cared for me enough and respected him enough to stand up for me to him,” he says carefully, “then he’s the fool, not you, and I’ll take no small measure of delight in letting him know that.”

“Tell him whatever you like,” she says, “but I do know a guy who can kill you and make it look like an accident if you make me look bad.”

He smiles properly for the first time since arriving back in Chicago. “Don’t change, Ruby.”

She waves him off. “Please. Where’s the fun in that?”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An exorcism, an end, a beginning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My apologies for my tardiness--I'm not good at being on time during the best of times, and these are decidedly not the best of times. Have some stuff, some fluff, and a conclusion. Much love to y'all.

It takes less time than he expected to get his affairs in order in Chicago, merely a few days; Ruby has been handling the bulk of the work for the Institute since he’d all but relocated to the Pacific Northwest, and she’d kept up with his Uptown apartment as well. The space is clean and tidy, distinctly not lived-in, and, he realizes as he takes one last turn about the place with his luggage packed up by the door, utterly devoid of personality. It had been an apartment for the man he’d been, the man who wore lies like a coat and suits like armor, who wielded logic all sword-sharp and used his empty bed as punctuation for his solitary life sentence. It used to have his books, his personal effects, all of his oldest and dearest and most painful ghosts, but even before Alex had come into the picture, he’d been spending more time at his office as if sensing, somehow, a sea change.

And now, everything he knows to be important is in Seattle, and since he did learn from one of the most determined people he’s ever met how to chase after what’s important, he exits his old apartment, locks the door behind him, and gets into the waiting Uber for the airport.

The flight is long, with a layover he spends wondering what he should text Alex—even if he _should_ text her, or call her, or warn her. _Are you at home?_ seems too distant for having not spoken to her since he left Seattle in the first place. Likewise, a simple _Dinner tonight?_ feels too formal for someone he’s seen come apart for him more times than he can readily count now, and _Hello, Alex_ rings uncomfortably close to anything Simon might have sent, and telling her the whole, unvarnished truth as bluntly as possible is a bridge too far. 

He leaves his phone on airplane mode.

The plane lands later than planned, thanks to a delay getting out of Denver. He expects jet lag, but instead the vague sense of floating through the days eases. Seattle feels familiar: not quite like home, but adjacent to it, an old friend who might as well be family, and he picks up his rental car to go to his father’s house without having to think too much about it. The drive takes more time than normal thanks to his late arrival and dinnertime traffic, so he gets out of the car and his luggage almost three hours after landing in Washington.

In front of him sits his father’s house. Sometime in between his headlong rush to Geneva and his return now, Ruby had clearly hired a renovation crew for the exterior, finishing the work she’d already set in motion. The house is now a warm, buttery yellow, lightened considerably from its years of decay. The front steps have been repaired, the railing around the porch has been fixed, and if it weren’t for the curious sensation of being watched, he would say that it looks ready to put on the market. He sighs, squares his shoulders, and heads up the front steps. Thankfully, the alarm code is the same, and he’s able to get into the house itself with no trouble. The feeling of being watched doesn’t abate, but he’s _tired_ still, weary of the long masquerade, and he drops the luggage in the entryway with an unceremonious thud.

“I’m done with you,” he says to the empty house, to the staircase marching upwards in front of him, to the rooms and the artifacts and the secrets and the ghosts. “You’ve taken enough out of me. Out of the people that I love. No more. You don’t get any more of me. This isn’t your place any longer. I’ve done my part. I don’t have anything else left to give you.”

From somewhere upstairs, there’s a questioning creak.

“I’ve been through the end of the world and back.” _Because it would take the end of the world for me to even entertain the fact that this might be something other than an old house settling._ “I have heard the song of the universe and the death rattle of a goddess. I have woven stars and listened to a heart beat in time with the pulse of the cosmos.” His voice grows steely. Something like the sea roars in his ears. Something like stardust glitters in his eyes. “It will take more than the meager wail of a meager ghost to impress me now.”

For a moment, he can feel nothing around him but a held breath, then, slowly, it is almost as though the house exhales, relieved of a burden it had never wished for. He waits, but the pounding of the sea in his veins settles into gentle tides. “Right,” he says into the quiet, suddenly feeling awkward and exposed. “So that’s that.”

He clears his throat and picks up his luggage, then heads towards his room on the second floor. His skin tingles from, oddly enough, _not_ being watched, vague anxiety settling into spare kinetic energy in his limbs, and as soon as he tosses his suitcase on the bed, he goes to the windows. With little grace, he tugs open the curtains and opens the window. Petrichor floods over him— _such a change from saltwater, that_ —and he drags in a careful breath before turning from the window and heading out of the room. He moves to the next room, pushing aside the curtains and opening the window, then the next, and the next, and the next, until the windows are all open and the light can come in.

It’s heavy-handed, and he knows it is, but it’s necessary, too. He ends up in the kitchen, feeling lighter than he has in years. Instinctively, he puts the kettle on, then goes to the pantry for his favorite tea. It’s not until he reaches for the French press he leaves tucked in by the coffee he doesn’t drink that he remembers that he won’t turn around to see Alex at the table. Some of the lightness sinks in his chest. He sits heavily in the nearest chair— _her_ chair—and drags in a breath before he digs his phone out of his pocket.

_To: Alex_  
_I miss you._

He sends it and waits. The kettle boils; he makes tea, lets it steep perfectly, adds a splash of milk and an ungodly amount of sugar, lets it sit for two minutes, then drinks it all. He tidies the few dishes, places an order for Thai, then goes through the house and shuts all the windows to keep the evening chill out. Dinner arrives; he eats, more than he normally would, then puts away the leftovers before he showers and gets ready for bed. He reads for a half hour, some book on the Winchester House that he can’t place the title of nor recall any of the contents of, then sets it aside and turns off the bedside lamp so he can sleep.

His phone stays dark. The message goes unanswered.

\--------------

He wakes up the next morning to a dead phone and a persistent ache stretching from his ribs to his heart. He sits up slowly, wincing; whatever he had done in Geneva meant that what should have been a potentially fatal wound on another man turned into a moderate inconvenience for him, namely sore ribs that took their time healing. But this is different than the ache he’d grown accustomed to in the months since he and Alex had started planning their last foray in apocalypse prevention; he can feel the stars he’d used to bind himself back together spinning against his bones, agitated and anxious. For a moment, he’s willing to pass it off as his own discomfort at the lack of response from Alex—but when he swings his legs over the side of his bed, a sharp slice of pain stabs from his breastbone to his heart, so sudden and harsh that he nearly blacks out.

Automatically, he presses his hand against his sternum; automatically, he remembers the nervous habit Alex had developed once they’d left what remained of Warren’s compound in Geneva. She bore Tiamat’s rage there, and it had scarred over with galaxies the same way the claw marks on his ribs had. He’d tasted them the first time they’d slept together after everything, ozone and sweat mingling on his tongue as he worshipped her the only way he knew how to, stars bursting in his mouth while her fingers tangled in his hair.

Something cold grips him: fear, or something so close it might as well be. _Is she hurting now because of what I did then?_

He glances back at his phone before he steels himself and crams it on the charger. He can’t stop and think about whether or not he should see her: he’ll talk himself out of it, and he doesn’t need any kind of psychic ability to know he’s running out of chances and time. He forces himself through his morning routine and then, halfway through shaving, realizes he’s going to need some sort of reason to actually get into the studio. _Because_ , he thinks dryly, _‘I wove Alex back together with scraps of the galaxy because I’m in love with her and I need to make sure I did it correctly’ sounds criminally nonsensical, even for us._ He finishes shaving, then digs out his laptop to place an order at the upscale French bakery near the studio. The interns and producers can be bribed, he knows, with a box of fresh pastries; even Nic isn’t immune to the lure of viennoiseries. But Alex has a soft spot in her heart for this particular bakery—she’d done a story on it, she’d told him once, when she was first starting out at the studio—and if anything says ‘please forgive me,’ he knows it will be her favorite tarte au citron and café viennois, small luxuries she can never really talk herself into allowing.

He snaps the laptop shut. His hands are shaking. _She doesn’t want to see me. She would have responded if she’d wanted to see me._ He stands, collects his wallet and keys, and adjusts the fit of his soft blue sweater across his chest. _She has every right to want to never see me again. She has every right to be furious or worse, indifferent._ He pulls the phone off the charger and turns it on—nowhere near full battery, but if he waits any longer, he’ll find an excuse that seems worthy enough of Ruby’s irritation and his own self-hatred and turn away. 

_You’ve got to take a fucking_ chance _on something. Even if it hurts. Even if it doesn’t work out. Even if the ways you care about people and the truths you carry don’t come across right, you have to take a chance._

“I’ve been through the end of the world and back,” he reminds himself, tucking his phone into his pocket and striding out the front door to his sensible rental car. “I have heard the song of the universe and the death rattle of a goddess. I have woven stars. I am a grown man, and I am perfectly capable of telling Alex I care for her.”

He starts the car. The radio bursts on; he turns it down hurriedly. Right before he’d left Chicago, he’d heard a local radio station playing clips from their podcast, and given that Alex is more or a less a local celebrity at this point, he’s not particularly keen on finding out what the mainstream media is saying about her, no matter how much Ruby had reassured him the current narrative was skewing more towards Alex’s successful thwarting of a cultish ecoterrorist ring than anything else. He takes a deep breath, his hands tight on the wheel.

“I have exorcised demons in spite of disbelieving in them for so long,” he tells himself as he heads out to Le Panier.

“I have laid to rest ghosts that had seemed more story than truth,” he says to the rearview mirror after collecting his preordered pastries and Alex’s coffee.

“I have thwarted the plans of a man who viewed mortality as a minor inconvenience and spent generations grooming my family to further his own twisted ends,” he announces to the half-full parking lot of the studio as he pulls into what is still jokingly labeled his spot, thanks to the interns and their now long-running obsession with chalk paint.

“I am a grown man,” he repeats softly, tugging out his security badge while juggling the boxes of pastries, a hot coffee, and a semi-desperate prayer that the badge still works. “And when she tells me that she doesn’t want to see me again, I will smile and thank her for her time, and that will have to be enough.”

The door clicks open, and he steps inside the cool, familiar hallways of the studio. The breakroom isn’t far from the main entrance, and already he can hear the chatter of the interns. They drew lots, he remembers, to decide which one of them was in charge of reception for the week, and he doesn’t know whether or not he’s lucky when he turns and recognizes the young woman at the desk as the intern who’d pieced together the story of Bobby Maimes.

She recognizes him immediately, but it seems as the the few months since he’d last interacted with her have tempered some of her rampant enthusiasm. “Dr. Strand! I didn’t know you were back in Seattle--Alex said you’d gone home to Chicago.”

“I had gone back to Chicago, yes,” he says, “but I had…unfinished business here.” It’s weak. He knows it. The intern knows it. He flushes and carries on. “I know I’ve shown up without an appointment, and given how things were left, I wanted to bring a peace offering, at least. Do you think you and your cohort could take care of these for me?”

He offers her the big pastry box, filled to the brim and sure to be devoured within the next twenty minutes. She tilts her head and studies him, then shrugs and accepts the box. “I take it you _don’t_ want me to page Alex and tell her you’re here?” she says, peeking under the lid to scope out the selection.

“I’d like to be as discreet as possible,” he agrees.

The intern snorts and snaps the lid shut. “Discreet. Yeah. Well, Alex is still in her office, as far as I know. You’re lucky you came today. She was saying something about a sabbatical.”

He feels cold. “A sabbatical.”

“You know Alex. She’ll take a sabbatical and come back having exposed the FBI as Illuminati or something.” The intern peeks under the lid again, then carefully reaches in and pulls out a brioche framboise that she immediately secrets away in the top drawer of the desk. “But yeah. Go ahead and head on up. Don’t do anything that’ll get me written up.”

“I’ll do my best,” he agrees faintly, and if his tactical retreat is closer to fleeing than not, he hopes she’s distracted enough by French carbohydrates not to mention it.

He walks briskly towards the back of the building where Alex’s office is. Time stretches and contracts. The box of pastries is too heavy and too light; the scent of her coffee is too strong and too weak. _I have been through the end of the world and back,_ he reminds himself. _I have heard the song of the universe and stitched myself back together with stardust. I have faced down an ancient chaos goddess and spun her into nothingness. This is so small in comparison. Just being honest. Just telling her the truth._

He stops a few doors down from their offices. _But it’s everything._

“—not like I’m asking you to saw off your arm or anything, Alex, really—”

He blinks. Alex’s door is partially open; he can see Nic through the crack, but more than that, he can hear them both. He recognizes the cajoling pitch in Nic’s voice and immediately knows that Alex is at a rolling boil and attempting to convince Nic she’s just at a simmer.

“I can’t just sit around and do _nothing_ , Nic. You know I can’t!”

“And you know just as well why we can’t give you any stories right now.” Nic shifts, sighs. “You’re too hot right now for us to assign you anything. And you’ve just gotten back from the end of the world—really, I know Dr. Bernier didn’t work out, but I bet I can ask around and find a therapist you can talk to—”

He edges closer to the wall, hoping that Nic won’t see him; inside the office, he can hear Alex sigh and knows she’s mentally counting to ten once forward, once back. 

“It’s not about finding a therapist. I just…” She trails off, sighs again, and the galaxies in his ribs tingle. “I need something to _do_. I don’t know what to do with idle time anymore. This story…it’s been my _life_ for three years, and with Rich—” Her voice is suddenly too thick for her to speak through. She clears her throat. “—with Dr. Strand gone, I can’t even…”

“Hey.” Nic’s voice is soft. “Alex, Alex—here, take a Kleenex—”

“I don’t know what’s _wrong_ with me!” He can hear her start pacing. Her coffee burns against his hands. “I’ve been sleeping, but it feels like I’m not getting any rest at all. My ribs hurt all the time. I feel like crying all day, and I know part of it is because I’m not out there. I need something to _do_. Come on, Nic. I’m not asking for anything huge or groundbreaking.” She pauses, her tone turning wheedling. “I’ll interview the geocaching guy again—”

“You know it’s not that.”

“Then what else am I supposed to do?” she spits out. “Wait for my reputation to recover? Wait for people to forget about me? About Richard?”

“Yes,” Nic says bluntly, “that’s exactly what you’re supposed to do. I don’t know how the story got twisted the way it did—”

“—probably Coralee,” Alex mutters, and privately, he agrees.

“—but it did, and I don’t want to question that or put you in a position where you’ll be even more professionally vulnerable than you already are.” There’s a beat of silence, another sigh. “Look, you should just take the sabbatical, okay? I don’t think anyone could recover from the end of the world in six weeks. Take the sabbatical. Hell, write a book. You could make it fiction, right?”

“Fiction,” she repeats, and while he never thought his heart would break while standing outside her office door with his hands full of bribery pastries, nevertheless it feels appropriate to shatter at the quiet grief in her voice. “Because no one would ever believe me.”

“That’s not it at all,” Nic protests. “I just…look, I can’t give you any kind of fairy tale ending, all right? But if you write it, you can write it however you like. Tie everything up however you want it. It’s cathartic. Healing. Choose-your-own-happy-ending.”

“Nic…”

He can almost hear Nic’s shoulders slump. “I don’t know what else you want me to say, Alex. Professionally, you’re blacklisted for awhile. No one’s going to trust you to tell their story until things cool down, and I don’t want to give you an assignment you won’t be able to succeed at through no fault of your own. Personally, I’m your best friend, and I love you, and I want you to feel better. You can’t even tell me what happened in Geneva. What happened with Strand. You need to take time for yourself. Do something for you.”

She scoffs. “Make up a happy ending that I know I’m not going to get?”

“I was thinking more along the lines of ‘get a dog,’” Nic offers. “Or you could dogsit mine. True Companion loves you.”

Alex groans. There’s shuffling from inside her office, then her voice grows nearer. “I still can’t believe you named that poor dog _True Companion_ —”

He’s frozen in the hallway, her heartbreak washing over him in waves, and as such, Nic nearly pushes Alex into him when he shoves her out of her office door. She stops dead in her tracks, her eyes wide.

“Dr. Strand.” Nic’s voice is absolutely frigid. “I don’t think you had an appointment today.”

He bites back the immediate _pettiness doesn’t suit you, Nicodemus_ that rises up in his throat. “I…I didn’t,” he says instead. “But I couldn’t.” Well, that’s not right. “That is. I—I left badly.” An understatement. “And I couldn’t—”

“Richard.” She cradles his name in her voice, says his name like he’s something holy instead of profane, and he’s immediately lost. The scars on his rib thrum; from the little sharp inhale and the way her hand presses against her chest, the stars in her sing in harmony. “You left,” she says.

“I did,” he agrees.

“But you’re here.”

“I am.”

Nic wraps an arm around Alex’s shoulders protectively. “Tell me why I shouldn’t call security right now, Dr. Strand.”

“I have two good reasons, actually,” he says, not looking away from Alex. “One is that I brought you breakfast.” He extends the pastry box to Nic, who takes it dubiously. “Two is that a…mutual friend of ours…reminded me that I had left something very important here.”

“A mutual friend,” Nic repeats.

He manages to look away from Alex long enough to meet Nic’s eyes squarely. “Yes. She’s feeling rather foolish right now, but she made some very good points. She was right about a lot of things. You should ask her about them.”

There is a long, taut silence. Finally, Nic sighs. “You have ten minutes, and then I’m going to have to ask you both to leave. You’re not associated with this studio anymore, Dr. Strand, and Alex, you really need to take that sabbatical.”

“Fifteen minutes,” he corrects, “because there’s someone you should call, Nicodemus, and I think my security deposit depends on her actually hearing from you.”

Nic’s ears pink, but he nods curtly. “Fifteen minutes. I’m setting a timer, Dr. Strand. Don’t think I won’t.”

“I can’t possibly doubt you,” he says, bone-dry, and while the pink on Nic’s ears deepens to red, he nevertheless removes his arm from around Alex’s shoulders and heads back down the hallway to his own office.

“What was that all about?” Alex asks, a little subdued.

“I’m not entirely sure,” he tells her. “Either my assistant has managed to sleep with your producing partner behind both of our backs, or they’re trying to, or she’s unfortunately fond of him, or he’s enamored with her, or some combination of all of it. I didn’t want to ask. She was already fairly worked up, and she threatened me with a stapler.”

“A stapler,” she repeats.

“A stapler,” he confirms, “and I’ve been on the receiving end of her temper enough times to know she’s unfortunately accurate with her aim. That wasn’t something I particularly wanted to explain in the emergency room, you understand.”

She laughs, and a little bit of the knot in his chest eases until she goes quiet. “Why are you here, Richard?” she asks finally.

He sighs, then extends the coffee cup to her. “Can we talk in your office? Privately?”

She doesn’t have to glance around to know that there are probably interns lurking around the corner; instead, she carefully takes the coffee cup from him and nods before she heads back into her office. He follows, shutting the door behind them.

He’s not sure what he expected, perhaps that nothing had changed and he would be able to walk into her office and add to her very own conspiracy wall. If he had walked in and found reams of evidence denouncing his name and shoving all of his lies into the light, he would not have been surprised. But instead, he walks into a half-packed room, a hurricane paused in mid-destruction.The lowest drawer on her filing cabinet is half-open, but her bookshelves are mostly bare. The awards she’d won and proudly framed on her walls rest face-down on the far side of her desk. The soft couch he’d slept on more than once during long nights is mostly hidden underneath the pile of sweaters she seemed to accumulate no matter where she went—including, he realizes with a little flutter in his stomach, one of his, a navy blue one slung over the top of the pile.

“You can take it back, if you want.”

Her voice is too loud; he jerks, startled. “I’m sorry?”

“Your sweater.” She nods in the direction of her couch, her arm wrapped tightly around her middle in a way he’s not seen from her in their three year working relationship. “I took it. I didn’t know if you were going to come back for it. I was going to mail it to the Institute tomorrow, so I guess it’s good that you came today.”

“Yes, I…I suppose it is.” He swallows hard and rakes his hand through his hair. “Alex, I—you know I didn’t come back for that sweater.”

“I don’t know what else you’d come back for.” She moves as though she’s going to set her coffee down on her desk before she stops; she raises it halfway to her mouth, then lowers her hand and looks away. “You’ve always come back to collect your things. Every time you pack up your toys and go home, I mean. I wanted you to be able to come in and get it easily. You shouldn’t have to stick around somewhere you don’t want to.”

“What are you _talking_ about?”

She sighs. “Richard.”

He frowns. “Alex, I don’t—”

“Are you seriously going to keep playing this game with me?” She’s brittle suddenly, staccato, slamming the words into the air like she’s trying to push them into the hole in the dam so she won’t break. “The story is _over_ , Richard. Everything is done. You got your answers. You stopped the end of the world. You get to go back to normal now, okay? You don’t have to humor me. I don’t want you to humor me. I just want you to get your sweater and go back to Chicago.”

The stars in his ribs burn. “You want me to leave?”

“Don’t ask me that. Please.”

“What else am I supposed to ask you, Alex?” He winces when she fixes her gaze firmly on the floor so she won’t have to look at him. “I came _back_. I came back for _you_. I—”

She shakes her head almost violently. “Don’t do this to me. It’s not _fair_.”

“How? How is this not fair? I’m trying to—”

“You’re not _trying_ to do anything. You made it abundantly clear how you really felt when you left.”

“I had to go back to the Institute.”

“You _had_ to.” She jerks her eyes up to meet his, and it’s worse than when she had avoided them; she’s never been good at schooling her expression, not like he knows he is. He’s faced down a goddess, faced down a man more demon than not, faced for a moment the cessation of the universe, and right now, none of those things can hold their own against the raw ache in her eyes. “The Institute was _fine_ while you were gone. While you were here. If you wanted to leave, I wish you would have just _said_.”

The burning in his side is replaced with ice. “Alex, there’s—there’s something you don’t _know_ —” 

“What don’t I know _this_ time, Richard?” Her hands tighten on the coffee cup. “You brought me back to work. To Nic. To Seattle. To Paul and Terry and the interns. To the stupid hotel Nic put me up in because I can’t go back to my apartment yet. You brought me _back_. I _know_ I shouldn’t be here. I _know_ I should be dead in the rubble in Geneva, but _you_ brought me back, and you brought me back here, and then you _left_. So yes, Richard—I _know_. I know exactly how far your sense of obligation takes you.” She drags in a deep breath and forces it out slowly. “I’m so _tired_ of being someone you’re obligated to. I don’t even care that you brought me back. I just—we’ve been to the end of the world together, and I was stupid enough to think you brought me back because you wanted me, not because you felt like you had to.”

The floor feels like it’s swirling beneath him. He sinks down heavily on her couch; his sweater falls into his lap. “You…you _knew?_ ”

She looks away from him, staring at the carpet instead. “Not at first,” she says after a long moment. “I thought—I mean, everything was so intense. I wasn’t sure _what_ was real. I can’t remember a lot of it. I think I’m refusing to remember a lot of it. Maybe I learned from so many people keeping information from me to keep me _safe_.” She perches on the edge of her desk, every line of her still defensive, and he can’t blame her for it. After a moment, she sighs and carries on. “I remember going into the compound. I remember that Warren wasn’t surprised to see us. I remember the sound—”

He can’t forget that sound, the unearthly scraping and wet, animalistic howling, the screaming and the singing.

“—I remember the darkness. The shadows. Then all the stars.”

“Tiamat,” he says quietly. “It was Tiamat. She—”

“She hurt you.” Her voice is small. “She hurt me.”

“She hurt me, yes.” He barely resists the urge to press his hand against his ribs. “But she—you were gone.”

For a long moment, they’re quiet; she won’t look at him, and he doesn’t know how to ask her to so he doesn’t have to remember her pale face and unseeing eyes. Finally, Alex looks up with a fragile, faintly wry smile. “I always wanted to do a piece on near-death experiences and the afterlife,” she offers. “Do you think I’m the authority on it now?”

He feels numb. “Don’t joke about that.”

“What else is there _for_ me to do about it?” Her eyes are dark and wet, but her jaw is tight. “I went into this knowing I probably wouldn’t come back out. The fact that I’m here right now—that I’ve _been_ here, without you—is the biggest joke the universe has ever told.”

“You’re not a joke. You being alive isn’t a joke. It’s the most important thing in the world.”

Her brow furrows, and the tightness in her jaw and shoulders drops. “I don’t—I’m not that important, Richard, I’m just—”

“I love you,” he says, and the stars in his ribs feel like they are going to burst. He might burst if he doesn’t tell her, if he doesn’t do something to make her realize what she means to him and how he understands the universe. “I love you so much that I don’t know how to define myself without that fact anymore. I love you, and when given the power to shape the world as I saw fit, the only thing I could think to do was to spin it back into being for you, because any world without you in it is not one I found worth saving, and because I knew you love this world enough for the both of us.”

He knows how this should continue according the grooves they’ve worn into conversation and habit: he should backtrack, wrap up sentiments in academia and deflection, give her some other mystery to chew on so that his raw heart can build a shell back up around itself. He should laugh with her, she should look at him a little too long, and they should never speak of it again. But the _shoulds_ drove them to the breaking point, to the very teeth of a goddess and her rage, and so he meets her eyes and carries on.

“I didn’t know how to tell you that you’d been brought back because I didn’t want you to be obligated to me.” He gets to his feet and takes the few steps to her desk, his heart pounding. In his ears, he can hear his stars singing. Her eyes are wide, her jaw dropped, but he carries on. “You deserve better than what I can offer you, and I didn’t—I _couldn’t_ —be so selfish as to assume that all that I am is what you want. I didn’t want to burden you with my selfishness, and once you remove me from the context of the end of the world, I know I am a far less attractive prospect that almost any other.” The music in his ears shifts, deepens. “I don’t have any more stories to give you. No more mysteries to solve. I just have the man I am, aching and imperfect and inadequate, but I love you, and I have loved you, and I will love you into the darkness after the stars in us have burnt out, whether or not you love me in return.”

She stares at him, and it is the bravest thing he’s done to stare back at her. “I’m sorry,” he stammers when the silence stretches out too long, and wildly, he wonders why he received abandonment issues instead of the ability to teleport in this whole game of cosmogonic horror roulette. “I shouldn’t have—”

“Say it again.”

He blinks. “I’m sorry?”

She shakes her head. “No. The first part.”

Something blooms in his ribs: a galaxy, perhaps, or a better universe than he could have possibly imagined. “I love you.”

“Again.”

“I love you.”

She’s grinning, and he can’t help but echo it, even as her own widens. “Again,” she demands.

He laughs, a little desperate. “Alex, I don’t—”

“Three _fucking_ years.” She pokes him in the chest, half furious, half joyous, and suddenly he feels like he can breathe fully for the first time in decades. “I spent three years pining after you, and it was _definitely_ unprofessional, and it took the end of the world as we know it for you to tell me you loved me, and I think I _deserve_ to be told as many times as I’d like. So, Richard Strand…” She fists her hands in his jacket and tugs him close enough that she can loop her hands around the back of his neck, and his own hands find their place on her waist like they’re returning home. “…tell me again that you love me, so I can say it back.”

He bends down to her and kisses her for the first time in days, and it’s like he has kissed her every day of his life, and it’s like every kiss is the first, fresh and glorious and permission to love her as fiercely as he can. “I love you,” he breathes against her. “I love you, and I’ll tell you as many times as you like, and I will never tire of it.”

“Good,” she says with a laugh, and it is the brightest exorcism he’s ever known. “Because I love you, and I’ve been in love with you for a long time, and I’ll tell you as many times as you need to hear it.”

He pulls away a little, just enough to meet her dark gaze. “You act like I don’t believe you.”

“I know you. You didn’t. Or maybe you couldn’t before.” In spite of the flicker of sadness over her face, she smiles, and it is sunrise-soft and just as warm. “But I’ve had practice getting you to believe things now, and I’ll give you all the evidence you need.” She curls her hand around his and then presses it flat over her heart, and for a moment, he can feel her heart beat and the stars that stitched her back together thrum in time. “I was gone, you know,” she says pensively.

“I know,” he whispers, leaning down to rest his forehead against hers. 

“I really don’t remember much. Just the stars. Just the singing.” She sets down her coffee to put her hand against his cheek, and he leans into the warmth of her automatically. “And your voice, saying my name over and over like a prayer. You brought me back, Richard. Not with your weird ‘what do you mean, I’m not actually a psychic’ powers, though they definitely helped.” She laughs at his expression, then leans up to kiss him lightly. “ _You_ brought me back. You called me home.”

He’s not sure what he says in response to that—some jumbled mix of _I always will_ and _what is home without you?_ —but there are far more important things to worry about, namely kissing her in her office as many times as she’ll let him. Her fingers are tangled in his hair, his hands are tight on her hips, and they’re not so much kissing as they are kissing and laughing, buoyant and relieved, when Nic knocks perfunctorily and then pushes her office door open without preamble.

“You know, Alex,” he says with a resigned sigh as Richard tries to pretend he doesn’t have both hands in Alex’s back pockets and Alex tries to pretend she’s not trying to leave a mark on his neck, “if you actually went on a sabbatical, you two could do whatever you’re doing here without worrying about the interns. I’m just putting that out there.”

“I take it your conversation with my assistant went well, then?” Richard asks. “Given that you’re not attempting to remove me by my ear?”

To his credit, Nic keeps a level expression, though he does blush. “It went fine. She asked me to text her if you’d ‘gotten the spine to do something with your life already,’ so luckily I don’t have to disappoint her.” He cracks a smile, one that Richard finds himself echoing—due in no small part to the way that Alex tucks herself against his chest and wraps her arms around him. “But seriously, guys. Just get out of here. Take the sabbatical. Hell, take two. I think you deserve it.”

“We do,” Richard agrees, looking down at the star-studded woman pressed against him. “What do you think, Alex? Where to? Italy? Iceland? New Zealand? Some place distinctly void of murderous forests and demonic cults?”

Alex tilts her head, pretending to ponder before she smiles and laughs as lightly as she did at the beginning of everything. “I think,” she says as she tilts her face to his in a silent but immediately fulfilled request for a kiss, “I want you to take me home, Richard.”

“Home?” he repeats, ignoring Nic’s fondly exasperated sigh.

She smiles at him, and the stars in him sing out in harmony with the stars in her, a binary system in orbit the way it should be. “Yes, Richard,” she says. “Take me home.”

**Author's Note:**

> As always, a special shout-out to my love Aproclivity, for all of her support, cheerleading, guidance, and music recommendations. <3


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